


as into an anchorage

by bereft_of_frogs



Series: part of our belongings (bad things happen bingo) [1]
Category: Into the Night (TV 2020)
Genre: Apocalypse, Bad Things Happen Bingo, Developing Friendships, Gen, I just really love Sylvie okay, Insomnia, Nightmares, Post-Season/Series 01
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-09
Updated: 2020-07-09
Packaged: 2021-03-05 04:28:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,407
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25158505
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bereft_of_frogs/pseuds/bereft_of_frogs
Summary: Sylvie has a hard time sleeping, after everything.
Relationships: Sylvie & Jakub, Sylvie & Mathieu
Series: part of our belongings (bad things happen bingo) [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1873021
Comments: 2
Kudos: 10
Collections: Bad Things Happen Bingo





	as into an anchorage

**Author's Note:**

> warnings for mention of canonical suicidal ideation / disclaimer that I am not a pilot of any kind my apologies for any mistakes
> 
> written for the 'Bad Things Happen Bingo' square: Nightmares
> 
> enjoy!

_“The villages were lighting up, constellations that greeted each other across the dusk. And, at the touch of his finger, his flying-lights flashed back a greeting to them. The earth grew spangled with light signals as each house lit its star, searching the vastness of the night as a lighthouse sweeps the sea. Now every place that sheltered human life was sparkling. And it rejoiced him to enter into this one night with a measured slowness, as into an anchorage.”_

_\- Night Flight, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (trans. Stuart Gilbert)_

Sylvie jolts awake, hands reaching out for the controls. She blinks and the cockpit array disappears, replaced by a ceiling of curved concrete. She lets out a breath, dropping her hands back to her sides. The feeling that she was missing something, that she’d fallen asleep on the job, fades when she realizes that, after so many nights of constantly flying, she’s on solid ground with nothing to do but rest.

She sighs and lifts her head. The bunker is wide and open, not divided into any sort of rooms, but it’s quiet at this time of day. The others are all still sound asleep, the passengers of their little plane and the residents of the bunker alike. The only exceptions are a few guards posted at the door, and one other monitoring the radios.

Despite the first guard they met telling her she’d find no rest here, once they were allowed in and met the commander of this place, they were all ordered to get as much sleep as they could as long as the sun was up.

“You’ve all been through a lot. We need you well rested for what is to come. We’ll explain everything - well, we’ll explain what we _can_ , once you’ve slept a bit,” the commander said and motioned to a pair of soldiers.

They’d found them food, and set up extra spots in the sleeping space for them. Sleeping arrangements are pretty sparse. Narrow pads, rough army-issue blankets, and thin pillows. But after all that time catching what sleep they could in the plane seats, it feels like a 5 star hotel.

There were a few cots, left for the injured. The bunker had a couple medics and one physician, but were, of course, far more well-supplied than they had been. There had been a flurry of activity, questions about conditions and injuries and treatment plans. Sylvie stood off to the side, feeling like she couldn’t do much to help, but she couldn’t leave either. Awkwardly, uselessly, she watched, in the way, as Zara handed off her son to a medic, as the physician shone a flashlight in Ayaz’s eyes, as they hooked Osman up to a heart monitor, pushed Mathieu to sit on a cot-

“Go.” Laura shoved at her. “Sylvie. Go rest.” The physician agreed with Laura that she should rest. He assured her they’ll all be well taken care of, and Laura pushed her more firmly towards the dark sleeping area. The other uninjured and most of the soldiers were already passed out on the sleeping pads. Sylvie took up a spot between Ines and Jakub and let the exhaustion pull at her bones.

She managed about 30 minutes of sleep before she jerked awake for the first time, reaching out for the control stick. Before every time she closed her eyes, she saw the glowing lights of the instrument panel and the wide expanse of the windshield.

Sylvie keeps trying to go to sleep, surrounded by the soft sounds of others sleeping around her, and every time, it doesn’t last. She drifts off and just before she’s fully asleep, she jolts awake, sure she’s missed something, sure she’s forgotten to check-

Nothing. They’re not flying. They’re safe, for now, in the bunker.

Sylvie sighs.

Something similar had happened, before Henri got sick, when she was on active duty. Usually only once a night, she’d jolt herself out of sleep thinking she heard the call alarm, or that she’d forgotten something on the check-list. But once it happened the first time, she’d always been able to go to sleep afterwards. Maybe it was the solid presence of Henri in bed beside her.

Henri was back on the plane. She left him there. He’s still on the plane, the urn in her pack, behind her seat in the cockpit. Maybe that’s why she can’t forget it, can’t fully relax.

A moment later she dismisses the thought as superstitious. Yes, no more superstitious than dragging Henri’s ashes with her all over the world during the apocalypse, but still. It probably doesn’t have anything to do with Henri. Her bad dreams are just because they’ve done nothing else but fly for the past several days - maybe up to a week. It was hard to measure time now. They existed in a haze, flying through darkness, taking no more than an hour break at a time. It’s natural that she’d have trouble adjusting.

She shuts her eyes again, trying all the tricks to fall asleep. She evens out her breath, relaxes her muscles. She counts to ten each inhale, holds it, and breathes out to the same count.

In her mind, she leaves the bunker. Dreaming, she’s back on the plane, alone in the cockpit. In that strange, doubled quality of shallow dreaming, she both feels herself falling deeper into slumber and sees the control panel spread out before her. Her head nods, instrument panel as her eyes drift further shut. A piercing, emergent alarm sounds in the cockpit, so loud and so real that when she bolts upright, she looks around for some commotion, something in the bunker that could have caused it.

As she catches her breath, she realizes that the alarm had been in her head, like everything else. The bunker is still quiet, everyone else still asleep. She flops back with an annoyed groan.

It had sounded like a low rotor speed warning. She laughs and shakes her head, looking up at the concrete ceiling. “That wouldn’t have made any sense,” she whispers into the quiet. “ _Fuck._ ”

Sylvie gives up trying to sleep. She casts aside her rough blanket and gets to her feet, stepping carefully over Jakub. Maybe a walk around the bunker will clear her head, remind her she’s on solid ground.

It does feel strange, walking without the gentle drifting of the plane beneath her feet. Without the white noise and vibration of the engines, of the air whipping past them. It’s like her legs are unsteady, like they’d forgotten what it’s really like to walk on steady ground. All the other times she’d been on the ground since this started had been panicked, full of adrenaline, with the need to act fast. It left no time to process anything. She’d barely been aware of her own body at all or the world around her at all, rushing to find supplies, to refuel, get the plane back in the air before day could break over the horizon. Now that she’d had a bit of rest, now that there was every possibility she’d be on the ground for an indefinite amount of time, it had all caught up to her.

She drifts over to the makeshift infirmary. Laura is asleep by Osman’s bedside, head tossed back. Zara sleeps curled protectively around her son, Ayaz not far away. The bunker’s doctor is even dozing in a chair off to the side, snoring lightly. They’ve done their best to stabilize everyone, but Osman’s heart rate is still pretty erratic, the numbers on the heart monitor going from too fast, to too slow. And there’s nothing to do but wait and see for Ayaz and Dominik. Head injuries are tricky under the best circumstances, and there’s not much they can do with no surgeon.

Mathieu sleeps alone. His white shirtsleeve is rolled up past the elbow to allow for the IV tubes, taped in place in the crook of his arm. They deliver fluids and antibiotics. His hand is wrapped in fresh, cleaner bandages than the ones they’d had on board. His color already looks a bit better, a bit less grey.

There’s a chair not far away. Sylvie drags it over and sits. She doesn’t know why she does, only that Mathieu sleeping alone looked just as lonely and adrift as she felt. So she sits down, so that he’s not alone anymore. She doesn’t think of trying to sleep. Just sits and looks out over the bunker. She still can’t quite believe it exists, that they managed to find it. If she’s honest, she sort of thought it would all eventually end with disaster. A sort of twisted version of her original plan. She’d fly around the world and then her life would be over. But then she survived. They all survived.

Well. Not all.

Something else to keep her up at night.

Instead of thinking about Terenzio dying in the sun, she thinks about the plane again.

The air is close in the bunker. It’s heavy and damp, from the lake above them. The air on the plane was always so cold, always so dry. Sylvie closes her eyes and the display lights dance before her eyelids. She can almost taste the ozone from when they flew over the thunderstorm, almost feel the cold touch of the controls under her palm.

She opens her eyes and the image vanishes.

When had she decided to become a pilot? She doesn’t remember growing up with the dream of it. It hadn’t been some lifelong goal. Like everything else in her life it sort of seemed like it happened to her. Small choices she made leading up to an inevitable conclusion. She does remember once, in the hospital when her mother was dying, going down to the emergency room for a snack and seeing the flight crew on their way out after transferring a patient. They seemed so above everything, in their crisp flight suits, carrying their equipment under their arms. The hospital had been bustling and chaotic, but they coolly chatted amongst themselves as they wheeled their stretcher, loaded with gear, towards one of the elevators.

Sylvie had followed at a distance. There wasn’t much else to do while her mother was sleeping. She went up to the closed cafeteria on the top floor and sat in a windowsill to watch them take off. It was early evening, the sun just starting to slip towards the horizon. Sylvie watched as the rotor blades started slowly, then sped up until they were nothing but a blur, and then the helicopter lifted off, carrying the crew into the sky. Lifting them out of the sadness and death and chaos of the hospital.

As an adult, she now knows what chaos actually waited for them out there. Even besides whatever call they’d find themselves on next, there would be the chaos of wind and obstacles and entwined mechanics and calculations that needed to be precise and small mistakes that sometimes snowballed into big ones. But that evening, watching them float off into the sky, it looked like the first peace she’d known in days.

And then her mother died and her relationship with her father withered and splintered, and when she finished school she decided the best thing to do for her life and her career was to join the army. When she joined up they looked at her degree and her aptitude scores and asked her if she’d considered flight school.

She thought of the way the helicopter had lifted off from the roof of the hospital and volunteered immediately. It had felt like a natural path opening up for her, putting her at the right place to seize the opportunity she hadn’t even known she wanted. She met Henri right after graduation. They’d been so happy.

“Are you alright?”

Sylvie jumps, startled out of her musings. “Sorry, did I wake you?”

“It’s fine,” Mathieu waves off her apology. “Don’t worry about it. You were staring off into space for quite a while there. Why aren’t you asleep yourself?”

“Couldn’t sleep.” She runs her hand through her hair. “Too much going on.” Mathieu nods. Sylvie settles her head back on her hand, biting her cheek as she debates telling him. She ultimately decides that out of any of them, he’d understand her struggle to turn off her mind. “I kept thinking we were back on the plane. Like I’d drifted off in the cockpit. Every time I was almost asleep, I panicked, thinking that I was falling asleep at the controls.”

“Ah.” They keep their voices soft, little more than whispers to avoid waking the others. “Understandable.”

“I mean, it used to happen all the time. You know, I would…run through checklists in my head when I was falling asleep, spend the night dreaming of all the flight procedures, over and over again. It got better. But now. Ah.” Sylvie scratches at the back of her neck. “I guess I just can’t really believe we’ve landed.”

“We have. I can’t believe this place is actually real either. But we have landed.”

“Yes.” Sylvie laughs a little. “We’ve landed.” But how long will it be before they have to take off again? She doesn’t exactly know if she dreads it. Flying under the circumstances had been terrifying. One single, minuscule thing going wrong could have meant the end for them all. But it also gave them control over their fates. They decided what they would do, where they would go, for themselves, not at anyone’s command. While they’ve found shelter and rest here, Sylvie’s not so sure about these soldiers, about their connection to NATO, about what they’ll ask of them. She had been too exhausted, too concerned with getting the injured help, to demand answers. Now they were still in the dark.

Instead of dwelling further on the precarious nature of their situation, she asks Mathieu, “How are you feeling?”

Mathieu shrugs. “Better.”

She shoots him a half-smile. “I don’t think that’s saying much.”

“Yes, well. I feel less like I’m about to die at any moment, so it is quite an improvement.” Mathieu pauses. “I honestly barely remember anything after…after they tried Ayaz? I remember parts of take-off, some of our conversation…but the rest is all a blur.”

“Laura said your fever was the highest she’s ever seen. You were not the most coherent.”

“For whatever I said, I apologize-”

“No. Don’t. Not your fault. If anyone should be apologizing, it’s me.”

Mathieu frowns. “Why?”

“I should have noticed before it got so bad. I thought it was just the stress of everything getting to you, the lack of sleep. I let you keep flying without rest until it was too late. And then, I _may_ have had Rik and Ayaz drag you bodily out of the cockpit. I felt bad about it at the time, if that makes it any better.”

“Ah. I do remember that part a bit now.” His brow furrows. “You did what you had to do to fly the plane safely. I can only be grateful.”

“I am never, _ever_ landing that plane by myself again. Clear?”

Mathieu laughs. “You did fine, I’m sure.”

“You were in a coma, so you don’t know. It was terrifying. See, you have to get better, to spare any passengers the ordeal.”

“I’m glad you were there,” Mathieu says. “I couldn’t have done it without you.”

“Honestly…I am too. I am. I thought for a while, ‘ugh, if only they hadn’t let me on this damned plane.’” She grits her teeth, feeling a swell of emotion that’s probably half fueled by exhaustion. “If they hadn’t, if she hadn’t given me first class, then I would have died like I meant to.” She laughs with the sting of tears in her eyes. “I wouldn’t have to do all this shit. Fuck. That moment when Terenzio came back and asked if there were any pilots. I was so pissed.” They laugh quietly. “I was pissed a bit at you too, for giving in.”

“Was I supposed to let him shoot you in the head?”

“Well, at the time, I thought that, yeah. I don’t now, so don’t worry.”

Mathieu reaches out with his uninjured hand to grab hers. “I’m glad you were on the plane. I’m sure the others are as well.”

“Yeah. I guess they are.” Sylvie sniffs and slips her hand out of his to wipe at her eyes before she really gets going. “I should let you get back to sleep.”

“You should get to sleep.”

“I don’t think I can.”

“Then I’ll stay up with you.”

“Mathieu-”

“Where were you going to go after Moscow?” Sylvie still hesitates, opening her mouth to tell him to rest again, but he urges her on. “We don’t have to talk about that either. We can talk about…whatever you want. Come on. We’re a team, Sylvie. I’m not going to just let you go off and be miserable by yourself.”

Sylvie settles back in the chair, hesitating for another second. “Okay. Fine. You win. After Moscow…”

She doesn’t know how long they talk for, whispering back and forth in the expansive bunker. She is in the middle of telling a story about some dramatics with a fellow student in university when she glances down and sees that Mathieu has drifted off. She stops talking, suddenly feeling almost dizzy with exhaustion.

 _Trying_ to sleep wouldn’t hurt. It won’t _work_ , but it can’t _hurt_. Just a few minutes to rest her eyes and then she’ll get up, she’ll walk around the bunker a bit more, she’ll leave Mathieu to sleep, to recover…

She’s too tired to move back to bed. And besides, she’s so sure she’s going to jerk awake in a few minutes anyways. Yes, she’ll just rest her eyes and then when she eventually jolts back awake she’ll go back to strolling around the bunker. Mathieu won’t mind.

She folds her arms on the edge of the cot and rests her head against them. Her eyes feel so heavy as she closes them.

Jakub wakes with Horst’s hand on his shoulder, shaking.

“It’s dusk,” Horst says gently. “They say there’s going to be a briefing in a half an hour, they’ll hand out rations just before that. Then he said they’ll let us go back to the plane, if we want to get our personal effects.”

Jakub doesn’t think there’s anything for him on the plane. The trip had been nothing, just riding along on a commercial flight, ready to be on his way back to Brussels the next day. Back to Lena. He hadn’t brought anything worth going back to salvage.

Sylvie had wanted to go back. Mathieu promised her they could go back because she’d left the ashes. If Sylvie wanted to go back, after all she’d done for them, Jakub would be more than happy to go-

Sylvie is not next to him, not where he remembers her settling down several hours before. The place where she’d been sleeping is turned over, blanket scrunched up, but the mat is empty. Jakub remembers the dark look on her face in Brussels, when she nearly gave up all hope, and is suddenly frightened.

“Sylvie…where’s Sylvie?” Where could she have gone? Nowhere. The soldiers would never have let her leave, but still Jakub finds himself worrying about her.

Horst inclines his head towards the row of cots then offers a hand to help Jakub to his feet.

The infirmary is still quiet, patients sleeping. Laura has woken up and smiles at him, mouthing ‘good morning.’ The physician is quietly making his rounds, frowning at something on an iPad while standing over Ayaz’s bed.

Sylvie is sound asleep, half in a chair, resting with her head on folded arms on the edge of Mathieu’s cot. Her face is more open and relaxed than Jakub’s seen it. The furrow is gone from her brow. He smiles at the two pilots.

“Let’s let them sleep a little while longer,” Jakub says quietly. He goes and picks up a discarded blanket from the ground. “We can fill them in later.”

“We should be sure to get food for them.”

Jakub nods. He settles the blanket over Sylvie’s shoulders. She stirs a little, then stills again, falling back into a deeper sleep.

For once, Sylvie dreams of nothing, not even flying.

**Author's Note:**

> So I just kind of came away from this show 1) in love with Sylvie and 2) very pro-the idea of her and Mathieu as like...pilot bros. I don't know. I just loved their dynamic. The look on both their faces when she showed up back in the cockpit in the second-to-last episode. Ugh. Pilot bros. 
> 
> This is definitely...softer? Than I expected for my first Bad Things Happen Bingo square, given what I usually write. I thought it fit well though. I actually thought I wouldn't come up with anything for 'Nightmares', since I felt like I've written a lot about nightmares in the past and I wouldn't be able to come up with anything new. But this just popped into my head. 
> 
> I also took some liberties with character backstories, of course.
> 
> Anyways! Not sure what the audience is out here for _Into the Night_ fanfiction, but here I am. I've got a couple more ideas, so I'll very likely be back. [I'm on tumblr](https://bereft-of-frogs.tumblr.com/), where I have been speaking into the Void about this show for days (though I usually write about the MCU - I do actually have a specific tag for this - [#BackOnMyAviationBullshit](https://bereft-of-frogs.tumblr.com/tagged/back-on-my-aviation-bullshit)). Please feel free to come say hi! Drop a line if you've read and enjoyed this fic, so I know I'm not entirely alone in the universe. ;-) (I mean...it's also okay if I am. I'm having a great time. These feel a little like my small gifts to the Void.)


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